I heard it all on a recent trip to the city, which included a visit to the memorial plaza, which opened Sept. 11, 2011 — the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center — and the museum, which opened in May.

With all the swirling chatter, professional and otherwise, the key to visiting the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks might be arriving without expectation.

It's also worth remembering that those eight acres in lower Manhattan are unlike any in the United States and could never have been redeveloped to please everyone. The site simply means too much to too many. But it is sacred American space, and for that reason alone it is worth visiting. Between the museum, the plaza and the surrounding neighborhood, it's worth half a day or more.

The experience begins with the plaza, and the very first thing I saw was as memorable as anything in the museum. At the periphery stand blue signs that lay out the rules. No alcohol or amplified devices seems reasonable.

But the irony of banning "expressive activity that has the effect, intent, or propensity to draw a crowd" runs deep. "Demonstrations" and "rallies" also are forbidden. In the narrative of "They hate us for our freedom" (which is a gross simplification), the attackers took a small piece of it at the World Trade Center.

Move into the plaza of pale concrete and thin trees, and you see two fountains, built in the footprints of the towers, at its heart. Each is nearly an acre in size, water rushing down the sides and into a second tier that appears bottomless from the viewer's perspective. Around the edges of the pools, carved into metal, are the names of the victims.

I've read an argument that the fountains are too large to be meaningful, but their power is simple: They don't just represent the fallen towers; they inhabit their actual space. While metaphor can be powerful, literalism is even more so when standing at those pools and looking into the sky at what isn't there.

The biggest draw of late has been the museum, which has attracted more than 430,000 visitors since opening May 21. Like the rest of ground zero, it's another impossible-to-please-everyone proposition. (Though most everyone seems united on the tackiness of including a gift shop).

The museum opted for as much sober literalism as it could fit, and the result is an exhausting collection of wreckage and recollections. It is meticulously, brutally and thoroughly assembled: shoes worn by people who fled the towers that day; a piece of antenna from the top of the toppled North Tower; a twisted, melted fire truck; the steel beams where American Flight 11 is believed to have struck the North Tower. In journalist speak (forgive me), it is a tremendously well-reported museum.

Much like the memorial at Shanksville, Pa., where the hijacked United Flight 93 crashed, the 9/11 museum is never cloying or manipulative. There is no jingoism or excess of patriotism.

The events of the day, and the physical space in which they unfolded, are left to speak for themselves. This includes a staircase, used by hundreds of people to escape the towers, preserved where it was on Sept. 11. At the foot of the stairs we clearly see where columns anchored the towers into the ground.

"Oh, my God," one visitor murmured. "This is where the columns were. This is where they died."

Sure enough. And the museum deliberately sends us into that space. In the footprint of each tower (like the fountains above) stands a gallery. One memorializes the victims; the other delves into the narrative of the day. The victims' gallery — every person is searchable and gets a short biography — is, of course, tremendously sad but admirably thorough. Mill through the room long enough and you're likely to overhear visitors chatting about a victim to whom they had a connection.

The other gallery begins with a quote — "We saw this paper stuff coming down … a lot things weren't making sense" — before picking apart Sept. 11, 2001, nearly minute by minute, from the mundane newspaper front pages of that day ("Key Leaders Talk of Possible Deals to Revive Economy" was The New York Times' lead story) to a ticket stub for a Yankees-White Sox game that wasn't played. They remind us how quickly ordinary life vanished.

The rest of the Sept. 11 narrative unfolds in excruciating detail: clips of TV reporters realizing the gravity of the attacks, video of the hijackers going through airport security and a small exhibition hidden behind a wall — preceded by a warning about "particularly disturbing" images — of people jumping from the burning towers.

The photos are accompanied by a quote from an observer on the ground: "You felt compelled to watch out of respect to them. They were ending their life without a choice and to turn away would have been wrong." You're suddenly in that witness' shoes, and it's wrenching.

To the museum's credit, there's a chapter dedicated to the rise of Islamic extremism after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which also makes clear that the United States supported the Afghanis, and a young Osama bin Laden, against its Cold War rival. Steps on, the 19 hijackers are named and their photos displayed. But the attackers aren't given equal weight; their photos are small and low to the ground, requiring effort to study. I lingered there a bit and saw most people, unsurprisingly, move on quickly.

The question I ultimately found myself weighing was why anyone would want to delve so deeply into such searing memories.

There's an argument that no one who was alive on that date in 2001 needs to bother with the museum; we lived it. But the museum wasn't built solely for us; it also was made for future generations that will know the event only as history.

What is obvious and painfully literal today could well be a reminder decades on of the worst, and best, humanity can do. But for those same reasons, I wouldn't blame someone who wants nothing to do with that museum in the here and now one bit.

The National September 11 Memorial Museum is open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily. Cost is $24 for adults; $18 for those 65 and older, U.S. veterans and college students; and $15 for children 7-17. Younger children get in free. Entry is free for everyone from 5 p.m. to close on Tuesdays. The memorial is open from 7:30 a.m. until 9 p.m. daily. Access is free. More information for both: 911memorial.org.